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GroupLens Team

Professors

John Riedl

My research focus is on collaborative systems that support human interaction through computer systems. My career goal is to understand how to develop and apply computer technology to the problems of human organizations.

One of the biggest such problems is getting the right information to the right people. The Internet has democratized the publishing process. Now, anyone who wants can publish anything they want, just by creating a Web site. We humans are hopelessly overmatched by the increasing volumes of information that are published. Collaborative filtering is a technology that enables us to all work together to sift through the millions of documents on any topic to find those that are most appropriate for each of us. Collaborative filtering works by learning which kinds of documents each of us likes, and finding other people who share out interests.

We are working on improving collaborative filtering by extending the amount and type of information it presents to users, the range of interfaces that it supports, and the other types of filtering algorithms with which it can be combined. For instance, we have explored ways to create explanations of collaborative filtering recommendations so users can understand why documents were recommended to them. We are also exploring community interfaces to collaborative filtering, which have the potential to strengthen the relationships between people in a group by helping them discover what they have in common with others in the group. We have also looked at communities in which some members of the community are not people, but are information filtering agents helping the people work more effectively.

Across our entire research program, our goal is to understand how computers can be used to help people process information more efficiently, and work together better.

Joseph Konstan

Prof. Konstan is interested in a wide range of topics under the general category of Human-Computer Interaction. His current work is mostly concerned with three areas:

  • Recommender Systems -- systems that provide personal recommendations based on a community of users' experiences. The GroupLens Research Project developed the technology for automated collaborative filtering (a type of recommender algorithm) and currently is applying the technique to content ranging from movies to research articles in a digital library.
  • Online Community -- studying why people choose to contribute to online communities and how to design communities to better foster participation of their members. Specific efforts include experiments with incentives to see how users respond and interdisciplinary (and multi-university work) to bring together psychology and economics to better inform interface design for online communities.
  • Computer Systems for HIV Prevention -- Prof. Konstan has been working for over five years with HIV Prevention researchers to assess the differential risks undertaken by men seeking sex with other men through online venues, and developing (and soon testing) an online intervention designed to reduce sexual risk-taking and sexually-transmitted infections.


Loren Terveen

My research interests are human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communication. I have done research in specific areas such as collaborative filtering, web search and information management, intelligent interfaces, organizational memory, and visualization. There's one problem I'm most interested in - using technology to help people create and develop strong social ties. I want to help people form communities based on shared interests. And I want to help members of local and institutional communities develop stronger connections. To pursue this goal, I'm guided by two research themes. Combining information and social spaces. I want to create online spaces where users interact with information (content) and other people - a simple example might be a music environment where people can both listen to music and find and interact with other people with similar tastes in music. I'm also interested in techniques for extracting information from records of people's online social activity - for example, extracting recommendations of web pages from Usenet messages. Combining physical and virtual interaction. I'm convinced that building strong social connections requires face-to-face, in-person interaction, that electronic communication alone just won't do the job. So I'm interested in ways to use electronic communication to enhance and strengthen existing communities whose members already have some face-to-face contact. I'm also interested in the use of mobile and location-aware devices that can integrate interaction in physical and virtual space.

Students

Aaron Halfaker

Aaron studies the social technologies that make online production communities (like Wikipedia) possible. Though he is primarily trained as a technologist, his interests are spread broadly across the physical sciences, biology, sociology, psychology and systems theory. Aaron's current work frames online communities as living (and sometimes dying) complex organisms that we could affect (grow, optimize or adapt) if we understood them. Along with his work in lab, Aaron moonlights as a research analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Website: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/

Twitter: @halfak

Andrew Sheppard

I am interested in all technical aspects of the Internet and World Wide Web, with a focus on building and growing collaborative websites. My current GroupLens project is tag synonym detection. I am also interested in data visualization, and am studying third-year Japanese.

Anuradha Uduwage

I am interest in applying data mining and machine learning techniques to analyze social networks and social theories behind these social networks. Coming from a diverse background I like to explore how cultural diversity and gender impact in social media. I am a simple person who enjoys any out door activities. I love cycling and try to get the maximum out of it during the short summers we have in Minneapolis. I love working out and play pickup basketball whenever I can because I just simply love basketball. I play couple of music instruments (Tabla, Sitar) compose music and write lyrics. Couple of songs that I wrote got BBC Radio air time during 2009 and 2010. I am the Sri Lankan of the GroupLens team.

Chuan Shi

I am broadly interested in anything about Web 2.0. I am especially interested in social networking and recommender systems. As a PhD student, I am still looking for the research topic that I have a passion about. Currently, I am focusing on applying tagging techniques to various systems. Before coming to the University of Minnesota, I got my Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Daniel Kluver

Broadly, I am interested in human computer interaction, building better systems, and understanding humans behavior online. To approach these problems I like to use models of human behavior to try to undesrtand how humans interact with systems. My current work is applying information theory to try to understand and improve user interactions in recommender systems. Outside of research I like folding origami.

Fernando Torre

I am interested in exploring how online social communities work and what their needs are. I want to look at ways to provide these communities better tools, mostly web applications that are easy to use, compelling, and that provide real value to users. I am currently working on the Android version of the Cyclopath geowiki as part of my research. Aside from research, I love to play volleyball, enjoy playing drums, play and teach the awesome game of Go, and am working on becoming fluent in Japanese and Chinese.

Katie Panciera

I am interested in understanding and explaining who is creating/destroying content on Wikipedia as well as evaluating public health information on Wikipedia. I graduated from Berea College in 2005 with degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science. In 2006, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Kenny Shores

My research interests are primarily focused on designing systems for efficient communication and studying the efficiency of human interactions with pre-existing systems. I am also interested in social psychology, specifically cooperation and competition in group settings. My current work looks at how presentation and design relate to learning and knowledge discovery in digital mediums, and on how to design systems that are organized for the expectations of their users. This includes work in medical informatics, Wikipedia, and online gaming.

Michael Ekstrand

My interests lie in software systems for enabling people to analyze, organize, and retrieve information in an intuitive manner. I am also interested in computer science education and in the intersection of human-computer interaction and software development, considering both tools for developing interactive software and viewing development tools and programming languages themselves as interaction problems.

Mikhil Masli

I'm interested in using computers and computing technology in making people live with people better. Prior to arriving in Minnesota, I was a software developer at Microsoft, India after completing my Bachelor of Technology degree from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India.

Morten Warncke-Wang

My main interest is how people interact and create a sense of community through computing devices, and how we can work to improve that. I'm the research labs' token Norwegian. Before coming to the University of Minnesota I worked as a web developer during the .com boom, first for a distance education company, and then later for Norway's first publicly traded Internet company. Once the boom crashed I left to go back to school and now hold an MS in Informatics from the University of Oslo, where my research area was information design, meaning "how can we improve the quality of the information we create?" When not working I tend to my love for music and guitars.

Shuo(Steven) Chang

My interest lies in the computer networking and social networking research. I am interested in designing more efficient and effective collaboration and social communication system. I joined GroupLens in 2011. Before coming to University of Minnesota, I got my bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China.

Tien T. Nguyen

My research interest is to apply techniques from data mining, machine learning, social network analysis, and user modeling to help users get useful and relevant information . I'm also interested in Human-Computer Interaction and its related fields.

Vikas Kumar

My research interest primarily lies in application of Machine Learning, Information Retrieval and Data Mining techniques in user or behavior modeling. Currently I am working in the area of Folksonomies (http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html) and looking for specific patterns of usage of tags by users in MovieLens to identify relevant under-utilized tags as well as tags that need to be discarded. Prior to joining UofM in Fall-2011 as PhD student, I completed my Bachelors from National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela, India in 2008 and joined Microsoft (India) and then later joined InsideView (India) - a start-up engaged in providing sales intelligence.

Staff

Alison Amundson, Project Specialist

Max Harper, Research Associate

I build research infrastructure, administer our systems, and pursue my own research interests. I am interested in social computing research, especially work that seeks to improve the utility of the Web.

Alumni